It's not unusual for visitors to turn up at Taylor Memorial Arboretum in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, when they originally set out for Tyler Arboretum in nearby Media, Pennsylvania. The latter gets a lot more publicity and holds a lot of public events, like plant sales.

However, Taylor doesn't disappoint. The 30-acre site along Ridley Creek is crisscrossed by a system of trails that lead visitors to extraordinary tree specimens, like a pair of Pennsylvania champion big trees: a giant dogwood with a 76-inch circumference and a needle juniper standing more than 50 feet tall. A personal penchant of mine lends special appeal to the arboretum's massive dawn redwood.

The arboretum clearly shows the trace of the typically formal plan applied to the site in the 1950s, when the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia planed for the conversion into a public site the arboretum begun in 1931 by Joshua Charles Taylor. At the time, Taylor was converting a small portion of what until 1882 was a thousand-acre mill complex by the 12-foot-tall Sharpless Dam.

The dam was removed in 2005 to restore native fish species like the American shad and hickory shad to the Ridley Creek, an effort matched by the arboretum's own efforts to restore the natural lay and diversity to the site. Species like viburnum and shadbush are being planted.

Arboretum staff also is taking care to preserve and upgrade a vernal pond that supports a variety of amphibian species, and the low-lying riparian tracts along the creek.